While every headline brings us a new twist to this year’s struggle for the presidency, 15 people are working in the background to decide the direction the country will take. You didn’t get to vote for any of them. They were chosen. Unlike the next president we elect, when these people leave you won’t get to have a say in their replacements.

Someone wiser than me confided that the secret to college is understanding that you are persevering against nothing. The only thing you are fighting is yourself as you acquire lots of debt to attend classes you will never use and study long, lonely hours while living like a pauper. If you stick with it, you get a piece of paper with very tangible rewards.

Posted November 16, 2014; Last updated November 17, 2014 by Bob Prokop

Should we regulate career colleges because the government owes low income students a job? That’s part of the message we’re getting from the Department of Education, which recently announced final regulations to penalize career colleges that don’t measure up. The purpose of the new rules is to prevent low income students from drowning in student loan debt because they can’t find decent jobs.

The Department of Education is giving its all to turn the failure to achieve equity in education into a civil rights problem. Tossing the race card on the table was a shamelessly transparent follow-up to the release of civil rights data on inequality in school discipline (see: Universal Preschool: Civil Rights and Race, or Bad Kids?